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The Roots of Exploitation and Inequality in Latin America

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The Roots of Exploitation and Inequality in Latin America University of Tennessee at Chattanooga UTC Scholar Student Research, Creative Works, and Honors Theses Publications 5-2020 Prevailing facets of Spanish colonialism: the roots of exploitation and inequality in Latin America Camden Eckler University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholar.utc.edu/honors-theses Part of the International Relations Commons Recommended Citation Eckler, Camden, "Prevailing facets of Spanish colonialism: the roots of exploitation and inequality in Latin America" (2020). Honors Theses. This Theses is brought to you for free and open access by the Student Research, Creative Works, and Publications at UTC Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of UTC Scholar. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Prevailing Facets of Spanish Colonialism: The Roots of Exploitation and Inequality in Latin America Camden L. Eckler Departmental Honors Thesis The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Political Science and Public Service Examination Date: April 10, 2020 Dr. Jessica Auchter Dr. Jeremy Strickler Associate Professor of Political Science Assistant Professor of Political Science Thesis Director Department Examiner Dr. Lynn Purkey Professor of Spanish Department Examiner Prevailing Facets of Spanish Colonialism 1 Introduction Three motives inspired the Spanish Crown’s exploration and colonization of Latin America: to spread Catholicism, to find wealth, mainly in the form of precious metals, and to expand the recently established Spanish empire. Exploitation and inequality were key characteristics of Spanish colonialism; the military personnel, noblemen, bureaucrats, and priests who constituted the four main groups of colonizers in Latin America carried with them a sense of entitlement and divine right fueled by Spain’s victory in the Reconquista against the Moors and an aversion to hard labor instilled by Spanish traditions of accumulating wealth and power through relationship-building and receiving privileges from the Crown rather than by performing work. Four main facets characterized Spanish colonialism and contributed to the persistence of inequality and exploitation in colonial institutions – conversion, easy money, centralism, and political violence. The facets of conversion, easy money, centralism, and political violence are not institutions in themselves, but rather practices and logics of Spanish colonialism whose presence can be seen in social, political, and economic institutions and traced throughout history despite changes and developments in institutions. These facets’ entrenched presence in the foundations of Latin American social, political, and economic institutions has manifested throughout the shared and unique histories of Latin American countries. The facets’ lingering impacts and logics can be traced in key shared events in Latin American countries’ histories, namely the Independence Wars in the 1800s, the latifundia land ownership system, and the debt crisis in the 1980s. Additionally, the facets are visible in the notorious Dirty Wars in Chile and Argentina, periods of terror and abuse perpetrated by the militarized state. It is important to clarify what area I mean when I refer to Latin America throughout this paper. Spain’s territories in the Americas stretched from present-day Western United States, 2 through Mexico and Central America, and across the Western half of South America. Latin America can be understood in different ways, but I use it to describe the territory encompassed by what is present-day Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina. This characterization of Latin America makes for a more detailed depiction of Spanish colonialism in those specific areas; it would be incorrect to generalize Spanish colonialism in the southern part of Latin America to Spanish colonialism in Central America (except for in Mexico, which experienced colonialism very similarly to Latin America due to its possession of the Aztec Empire), mostly because Spanish colonialism was more concentrated in, and thus played a more significant role in the development of, South American countries of Latin America. Southern Latin America was home to the Inca Empire, and previous research shows that the Spaniards “tended to colonize most extensively precolonial regions that were populous and highly developed,” for example territories of the Inca Empire in Southern Latin America and of the Aztec Empire in Mexico.1 While maintaining this distinction of and focus on South American Latin America, keep in mind that the same logics and practices of Spanish colonialism were present throughout other Spanish colonial territories as well; my distinction simply helps to narrow the scope of this project and provide a more detailed analysis and discussion of a smaller area. Spain’s colonization of Latin America was unique in its methods and the underlying practices, motivations, and logics behind those methods, especially when compared to England’s colonization of North America. English colonialism in North America occurred mostly at the hands of commoners; the famous Puritan Pilgrims sought independence from the Church of England and a new start away from a country which persecuted them for their religious beliefs. 1 Matthew Lange, James Mahoney, and Matthias vom Hau, “Colonialism and Development: A Comparative Analysis of Spanish and British Colonies,” American Journal of Sociology 111, no. 5 (2006): 1412. 3 Spanish colonialism was joint effort between the Crown and the Catholic Church that aimed to further the power of both, while individuals religiously separated from their monarch and country built the early English colonies in America. English colonists sailed to America to start a new life with no intentions of returning to England, a motivation fundamentally opposed to Spanish colonists’ motives, which were to spread Catholicism, extract wealth from the Americas, and return to Spain with an elevated economic, and therefore social, status. These differences in intentions are evidenced by the types of people sent to colonize the Americas. Early English colonists were families, men and women, prepared to work to settle in a foreign land, yet Spanish colonists consisted of priests, military men, bureaucrats, and noblemen expecting to conquer and convert under the authorities of the Crown and the Church. Differences between England’s and Spain’s approaches to colonizing the Americas explain why liberal and capitalist institutions valuing private property and independence from centralized rule became the building blocks of the United States but struggle to survive in Latin America. English colonists’ desire to build something new and better for themselves and their families opposed Spanish colonists’ preservation of Spanish political and economic power structures from which they benefited. It is important to understand the uniqueness of Spanish colonialism and not to generalize colonialism. Exploitation and inequality characterized all colonialism, but colonialism occurred for numerous reasons and in differing ways in colonized areas. Not recognizing the distinctions between colonized countries’ colonial experiences forms incomplete pictures of the origins and developments of different manifestations of the shared colonial logics of exploitation and inequality. By looking at generalized and specific events in which Spanish colonial logics and practices recur, we can gain a deeper understanding of why economic and political instability 4 and inequality continue to plague many Latin American countries. My research’s identification of how main facets of Spanish colonialism became rooted in Latin America additionally facilitates a better comprehension of the reasons behind failed attempts to address residual colonial logics of exploitation and inequality. Existing scholarship discusses the various aspects of Spanish colonialism, commonly the encomienda system of labor and the role of the Catholic Church. Some research also focuses on how poverty and exploitation in Latin America originated in Latin America’s colonial period. However, none of these works trace specific facets of Spanish colonialism from the Reconquista into foundational Latin American institutions and then throughout shared events in Latin American history. Additionally, the Dirty Wars, while thoroughly studied (Argentina’s more than Chile’s), have not previously been explored within the proposed framework of the persistence of facets of Spanish colonialism. This paper contains two main sections of analysis. The first part will provide a brief historical narrative of the experiences in Spain’s history, most importantly the Reconquista, that contributed to the formation of the conversion, easy money, centralism, and political violence facets of Spanish colonialism. The facets are then explored in detail, establishing the theoretical framework that will be applied in the paper’s second part, which describes generalized manifestations of the facets in the independence wars, the development of the latifundio system, and the 1980s debt crisis. The analysis concludes with a more specific investigation into the manifestations of the facets in Chile’s and Argentina’s Dirty Wars. Roots of Spanish Colonialism Contrary to colonialism by England and France, Spain and Portugal approached the colonization of Central and South America with strongly religious motives. The Iberian Peninsula, in which
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